The Love That Split the World

  Short term, I want nothing more than to stand against him like this. Long term, I know letting this happen will make things hurt worse later.

  I pull back and sit down on the floor, folding my knees up against my chest. He sits down across from me. “Tell me everything,” I say.

  He looks down at his hands and nods. “It started happening when I was five,” he says. “My mom and Mason would disappear for an hour or so, and then they’d be back, acting like they’d never gone anywhere. It got bigger fast. Sometimes whole buildings changed. There were two different versions of my house. There was the one we lived in, but sometimes while I was outside playing, I’d look back and the place would be all overgrown, the windows busted, that kind of thing. Then it was people. I met a version of Kincaid who didn’t know me.”

  “Matt?” I say.

  Beau nods. “We’ve lived on his rental property my whole life. Kincaid and I grew up playin’ together, then one day, I went over to his yard, and he introduced himself to me, like we’d never met. He took me into his house, and his dad didn’t know me either. Nicest Raymond Kincaid ever treated me,” he says with the hint of a smile.

  “No one lives in Matt’s rental property,” I say.

  “Not in your version,” Beau says. I stare blankly at him and he goes on. “When I was ten, my mom sent me to take piano lessons. It never happened while the teacher was watching, but if I played alone, sometimes things would disappear from the room. Little changes, nothing big. When I stopped playing, everything would go back to normal.

  “It got worse and worse. My mom would’ve thought I was going crazy if she was around enough. Instead she figured it was just a phase and sent me to live with my dad. It happened less while I was there, but when it did, it was bad. One time my dad didn’t even know who I was, chased me out of the house with a baseball bat in the middle of the night, but when I came back an hour later, he acted totally normal. Anyway, he’d had enough after a year and a half, and when I got back here, it was worse than before.

  “I was a freshman when I figured out I could go between them when I wanted. Especially when I was playing piano, or listening to it, or even if I was just thinking about a song. Alcohol makes it easier too. And sometimes, I could go forward.”

  “Forward?”

  His hazel eyes flash up to mine. “In time.”

  “That’s impossible,” I say, breathless.

  He laughs. “It’s all impossible, Natalie.”

  “Good point,” I say, massaging my forehead. “So are there two futures?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. When I’m going forward, I can’t slow it down. It’s like . . .” He thinks for a second. “It’s like I’m standing in one place and makin’ the world go past me, but as soon as I try to freeze it, live in it, I fall back into now, either my version or yours.”

  “None of this makes any sense.”

  “It doesn’t,” he admits. “That’s why I didn’t tell anyone about it. There’s no visible proof. It doesn’t matter if other people are around when time starts moving; when it stops, I return right back into the present. For them it’s like nothing happened, like I just blanked out for a second, no matter how long it felt like to me. I managed to take Mason’s hamster with me once when I was a kid, but that didn’t do me any good, and I could never replicate that with actual people, so I gave up. I’d go to the school at night to play piano, and I’d pass over to your version of the world, and then when the janitor came running in, I’d stop playing and let myself fall back into my version.”

  “The Band Room Ghost,” I say.

  He shrugs his shoulders. “The night I met you, I tried to go back to my version, but I couldn’t. I thought it was just like it was with everyone else—like I was tuning in to where you were supposed to be, and that was what grounded me in your world. But then, after that night, you kept seeing flickers of my version of things. You saw the church with the extra wing, and you saw me and Rachel at the mall today.”

  I stare down at the carpet. “Your version of Rachel, though,” I say, trying to sound natural.

  He nods. “Rachel’s pretty much Rachel, no matter where she is.”

  “She’s your . . .”

  “Nothing,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Your ex?” I guess.

  He looks at me for a long moment. “Something like that.”

  “What about that night on the football field? Was she your ex then?”

  His eyes dart sideways toward the window then back down to the ground. “Not quite.” My stomach turns, and I cover my face, massaging my temples. “Natalie,” he says.

  I shake my head and let my hands fall. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “There are more important things to worry about.”

  He stares at me, eyes heavy, as if he’s asking me for something, and the inside of my chest feels like tearing paper. “That’s why I didn’t show up,” he says finally. “When we first met I didn’t even know who you were, where you fit in. But when you saw all that stuff—my version of stuff—the way you acted, I didn’t know what to think about it at first. Then your phone number didn’t work in my world, and I started putting it together. So I got this.” He holds up a crappy flip phone.

  “What, is that a burner for calling drug dealers?” I say dryly.

  He gives me a mock-reproachful look. “Sort of,” he says. “It’s to call you. I bought it in your version, so when you called my number, it’d actually go through. The other night I wanted to see you. Thought you’d be at Schwartz’s Fourth of July party, so I went, but I couldn’t get to your version. Happens once in a while. Drank too much, and I still couldn’t get through. Still couldn’t the next day. Anyway, after I saw you today, I decided to try again.”

  I pull anxiously at the carpet. “Alcohol really helps you pass between them?”

  He shrugs one shoulder. “Maybe. I thought so, anyway.”

  “Seems like a pretty convenient excuse for alcoholism. Takes the concept of social lubrication to a whole new level.”

  When I look up, Beau gives me one of those heavy smiles: summer in mouth form. “Well, Natalie Cleary, how ’bout you figure out how to pass back and forth, and then I won’t have to drink to find you.”

  I laugh. “If you stop drinking beer, then what are you going to pour over your cereal?”

  “Beer doesn’t count as drinking.”

  I laugh again. “Oh, another convenient view.”

  “Fine,” he says. “I’ll cut out beer too, get into scrambled eggs or something. You just figure out how to get to my Union, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, fighting a smile. Then something important occurs to me. “I think I’m looking for someone in your version. Or maybe she’s in both versions, or in a third altogether. I’m not really sure. She’s an old woman with gray hair and dark skin, and she calls herself Grandmother. Have you seen anyone like that?”

  He hesitates, pushing his hair back and down his neck. “Natalie.”

  “What?”

  “As far as I know, we have all the same people you have,” he says. “There’s two of everyone.”

  “Everyone?” I say.

  He holds my eyes for a long moment. “Except us.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nods. “I’d never seen you before that night in the school.”

  “I saw you on the field that night,” I say. “I was at Senior Night, and right in the middle of everything, everyone disappeared. It was just us.”

  He looks up at me, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Our Senior Night was the week before yours. I was there alone that night.” He looks at me until I can’t hold his gaze anymore. “Can I show you something?”

  I nod, and he gets to his feet. “Stand up,” he says. “Give me your hands.”

  I do and climb to my feet. We stand there, holding hands, heat spr
eading from his fingers down my arms to my stomach. He reaches over my shoulder to flick off the closet light and presses his forehead against mine. “Close your eyes for a second,” he whispers against my mouth, and I do, feeling him all around me, in all the spaces where we’re not quite touching.

  There’s a drop in my stomach, like my center of gravity is sinking into wet sand, and light flickers against my eyelids—red, yellow, blue, purple—like a movie reel. “Now open them,” Beau whispers.

  My eyes flutter open. The dim light spilling across Beau’s face is a silvery blue, but as I look into his eyes, the light beyond the window changes, rapidly intensifying through a hundred shades of pink into burning purple and then a blinding gold that slants through his irises like coppery spears. Within seconds the closet is lit up with daylight. Just as quickly, the daylight’s waning, the gold swarming back in to color Beau’s cheekbones and eyes and mouth as the sun falls down the western side of the house. Soon that turns to orange, then purple, deepening finally into a blue so dark it stretches out toward black.

  The cycle repeats, the colors washing over us in new variations of the same shades, moving faster and faster until it’s like we’re standing in the center of the solar system, and it’s the sun that circles us. Rising east of us and setting west of us. But somehow it also feels like we’re moving, walking through chin-high water that pushes gently back against us.

  The whole world is changing, and I gasp as another version of me moves between the closet and the room so fast I can barely see her. The closet empties, refilling with organized plastic bins I’ve never seen before, shadows of people I don’t know blurring past, moving right through us. Those boxes disappear too, replaced by racks of clothes, and all the time the sun is rising and setting and Beau’s hands are on mine.

  Everything is changing, except Beau and me. We’re the same.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whisper.

  He nods, never looking away from me.

  “Do you think they hear us?”

  The walls and floor are aging now, the light still juddering through its phases like a movie from a projector, until the drywall starts crumbling, spiderwebbed with vines and weeds. From those vines, flowers blossom and wither and grow back and die again. Seasons stretch into years stretch into decades stretch into centuries, all in moments, while I can hear Beau’s breath, make out his edges through the millisecond of dark before another morning comes.

  “I don’t think there’s anyone left to hear us,” Beau says.

  He’s right. I laugh because I don’t know what else to do. We’re standing at the end of the world, light looping over us.

  He moves closer to me, and the pressure in my stomach disappears, the light falling away to leave us together in my closet in the dark. My breathing feels shallow now. I can barely see Beau towering over me, but I can feel him. I can still feel his kiss on my lips, and I’m acutely aware of the distance from his mouth to mine.

  And then there’s no distance. My back is against the closet door, and Beau’s kissing me slowly, softly, his roughened hands on my stomach, mine tangling in his hair. His hands glide up to my neck, his fingers burrowing into my skin then sliding gently down the sides of my throat to my collarbones. As before, the light passes over us, but this time my stomach lifts like I’m falling through space and the sun is rising up in the west, just outside the closet window and falling down behind the house, full night cycling into sunset then midday and morning.

  When the kiss ends, we stay there for a while, my heart still thundering as the sun cycles west to east again and again, a Ferris wheel of color twirling around us. An earlier version of me moves backward between the closet and the bedroom, an impossibly fast blur of brown. The sensation of being pulled backward through water works against my legs and back.

  Down in the cul-de-sac, sparks of light rise off the ground, drawing together high in the sky to form a blossom of colorful fire—fireworks.

  We’ve reached the fourth of July, and when all the fireworks have been undone, full night swallows us again. Our breath the only sound in the dark, his hands on mine the only thing grounding me.

  “Show me how to do that,” I whisper.

  He looks out the window. “I think you are doing that.”

  He kisses me again, lifting me up against the door, and the world speeds forward once more. This time when it reaches the age of crumbling walls and reaching vines, I try to hold it there around us. I try to hold us there, at the end of the world.

  “A long time ago, there was a drought,” I tell Beau. We’re lying in the closet on our sides, his arm draped over my waist, hand resting on the back of my thigh. “And all the water dried up, every creek and stream, every river and lake, and the ocean surrounding America.

  “The people became hungry and thirsty, so they wandered the world, looking for anything they could eat or drink. But when they found dead fish and animals where the water had been, they became angry. They blamed the animals for the drought, and they began to hack at their dead bodies, pulling them into pieces and flinging them around in their rage.

  “This went on for some time, until a strong wind passed over them, and the people froze and looked up. They saw a man, carried by the wind, coming down to them. When he touched the earth, he spoke. ‘You’ve acted as fools,’ he told them. ‘You’ve abused me and each other and all that I created for you to enjoy and care for.’

  “Then the man held out a leaf, and four drops of water fell from it to the earth. The water spread out from there, covering all the land in a flood. The man then chose several people to follow him up a mountain, and as the water continued to rise, the man spoke to the mountain and made it rise too, carrying the people to safety.

  “They stayed on the mountain for four days before the floods retreated, leaving all the earth green again where it had gone dry. The man led the people back down from the mountain and they saw that the people who had stayed below the water had not drowned, but had been reborn as fish and alligators and other animals, so great in number that the empty earth was filled again.

  “In this way the man remade the world, righting every wrong.”

  “The end?” Beau says, running his hand down my side.

  “Or the beginning,” I say, “depending on how you look at it. That’s what Grandmother used to say, anyway.”

  He turns onto his back and I lay my head on his shoulder, resting my hand on his chest and feeling every breath pass through his lungs. “I’ll help you any way I can,” he says. “Finding her before you go, I mean.”

  Right now the thought of leaving makes me want to dig my hands into Beau and freeze time around us. I turn to burrow into his T-shirt and breathe him in.

  “I would’ve drowned in that flood,” he says, and I sit up abruptly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In my version, Kincaid’s not doing good,” he says. “He was always happier in your version. Probably ’cause he’s had you.”

  “Matt and I are over,” I say. “Regardless of this . . . you.”

  A faint smile crosses his face, but it quickly fades back into a serious, thoughtful look as his fingers skim down my arm. “He wouldn’t do this to me.”

  “You don’t know what he’d do,” I say. “You don’t know the same Matt I know.” After what happened at his party, I’m not sure I do either.

  “And you don’t know the one I’m friends with,” he says.

  “Exactly. They’re two different people,” I say. “You don’t need to feel bad about this.”

  He gives a humorless laugh and shakes his head. “It wouldn’t matter,” he says. “If we were in the same world, the one where Kincaid was in love with you, I’d still be here. If you wanted me, I’d be here.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  He hides a grin and runs his thumb over my lips. “I’m not sure the world and me are as
complicated as you think, Natalie. I didn’t mean to choose you or anything. I just know if I only get to build one porch in my life, I’d like it to be yours, and if there’s one person I never have to hurt or disappoint, I’d want that to be you too.”

  I grab the sides of his face and kiss him again, slowly, deeply, his hands coming around me and lifting me over and on top of him. I fold over him to whisper, “I would still want you here too. In every version of the world, I would.”

  Beau tightens his arms around me and kisses the top of my head. “Tell me one more and then I’ll go.”

  “You don’t have to leave,” I say. “You could just disappear if someone came in.”

  “And then I’d wind up in someone else’s closet,” he points out. “The first time I threw rocks at your window, an old man came outside, screaming about calling the cops.”

  “Then you could stay in my version and just climb out the window.”

  He looks down at me, smoothing the hair away from my face. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to.”

  Forever, I think. This moment, forever. I’m self-aware enough, if only barely, to know that I’ve always had a hard time focusing on the present. I mean, for months leading up to Megan leaving all I could think about was the time we spent together and how it was going to feel to be without her. Once, Dad caught me crying about it when he brought a stack of laundry into my room. At first he apologized and turned to go, but then I assume the haloed Little Mom on his shoulder told him to stay and comfort me. When I told him why I was upset, that I already missed Megan even though she hadn’t gone, he fought a smile, cleared his throat, and said, “You’ve gotta enjoy the moment, sugar cube. You’ll miss your whole life looking forward and backward if you’re not careful.”

  People say that kind of thing all the time, and I believe them. The problem is I can’t stop it. I can’t make my brain forget the past, or my heart disregard what might come in the future.